All items listed and reviewed are available for purchase directly from Brickbat Books, although quantities are limited. Brickbat Books is located at 709 South Fourth Street, in the heart of Fabric Row, in Philadelphia.

Monday, May 24, 2010

A completely bizarre French novel/linguistic rabbit hole, A Void is one of a kind. To loosely outline the plot (eccentric friends attempt to track down a missing companion and become ensnarled in a dizzying Moebius strip of history and wordplay) is beside the point. This is an extremely odd and hilarious work. Perhaps the most notorious element is the complete absence of the letter "E". While not being able to read French, we can only assume Gilbert Adair's translation does absolute justice to every trick and turn. Here are 2 rare and hard-to-come-by editions of this classic.

Sunday, May 23, 2010

...kind of mystifying why Kalman's work has fallen out of print, especially with a major exhibition this year, a monograph devoted to her career, and an army of imitators whose own work is readily available. Below are three classics.

Ooh-La-La (Max In Love)Hardcover, 1st edition (out of print)$24.95

Hey Willy, See The PyramidsHardcover, 1st edition (out of print)$29.95

Monday, May 17, 2010

"The general public has only a hazy notion of the life of a cartoonist. Last week a man asked me how much a cartoonist gets for a cartoon. 'Two or three dollars?' he hazarded. Yesterday a cartoonist told me he is thinking of buying a castle..." -from the introduction

"Like Simenon, the cartoonist has few illusions about the human race. In a sad and melancholy frame of mind he dips his pen in India ink to show us yet another of our follies. Fortunately for us he is filled with tolerance and a love for people, so his cartoon is funny. But the cartoonist does not laugh." -from the introduction

All Thumbs, Cartoons by W Miller$14.95

Interviewer: Did You Learn anything in the year you spent at art school in Chicago?Miller: Ah...I don't know.Interviewer: Who was or who were your chief models?Miller: Louis Armstrong.Interviewer: What are your working habits?Miller: What! Describe what you mean, please! -from the introduction by Whitney Balliett

Jaf, Cartoons$14.95

"Jaf's vision of the world we live in reflects the absurdities of that world as well as the forces emerging to change it in much the same way as the works of James Thurber, Saul Steinberg, William Steig and Jules Feiffer."

"The moment I saw her, I knew I had to have her. I had to have her even if I died for it, even if others died...Around her throat hung a necklace of human skulls. Her earrings were pendant corpses, her girdle a writhing tangle of serpents caressed by the hands of the dead. Her brows and breasts were bathed in the bright beauty of blood."

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

"When Danny Dunn tips over the mysterious jar of glistening liquid, he has no way of knowing he will involve himself, and his friend Joe, and Professor Bullfinch in a wild flight between planets. But anything can happen when Danny is around- and practically does!"

Monday, May 10, 2010

In the mid-1960s, Tom Phillips took a forgotten nineteenth-century novel, W.H. Mallock's A Human Document, and began working over the extant text to create something new. The artist writes,

'I plundered, mined and undermined its text to make it yield the ghosts of other possible stories, scenes, poems, erotic incidents and surrealist catastrophes which seemed to lurk within its wall of words. As I worked on it, I replaced the text I'd stripped away with visual images of all kinds. I began to tell and depict, among other memories, dreams and reflections, the sad story of Bill Toge, one of love's casualties.'

After its first publication in 1980, A Humument rapidly became a cult classic.

‘An art book of almost mythical significance … each page sublimely embellished … a creation that is something rich and strange’

Sunday, May 9, 2010

Edited by author Barry Gifford, Black Lizard was responsible for bringing some of the great lost masterpieces of noir fiction back into print after years of domestic oblivion, eventually setting off a Hollywood feeding frenzy before being purchased by Vintage, who wasted little time in deleting most of the catalog.

...here's what the crypto-literary Max said upon their first arrival in the shop last year:

The Black Lizard imprint has consistently published cream of the crop crime fiction, both original titles and reprints of classic out-of-print and unknown noir. These are not mysteries where bumbling old ladies whimsically solve murders, nor are these hard boiled detective novels where the hard-as-nails detective wisecracks around and scores a hot dame. These are much darker stories- the protagonists are often small-time crooks or average joes thrust into desperate situations, depressed and depraved and unsympathetic, with casual violence and lives spiraling into the black abyss. The authors all delve into these worlds in their own ways, ranging from the terse and tough Paul Cain to Barry Gifford's hallucinatory existentialism to David Goodis' hopeless down-and-outers to W.L. Heath's small town dramas. All deal with the uglier side of humanity and are all highly recommended.